Bientôt l’été is a videogame for two players. Two players who pretend to be lovers. They pretend to be lovers separated from each other by lightyears of deep space. They have lonely walks along the shore of a simulated ocean, thinking wistful thoughts of each other. Thoughts from ancient Earth literature by Marguerite Duras.

Buy Bientôt l'été

February 16

As of now, you can pre-order our new game Sunset from the game's web page: http://tale-of-tales.com/Sunset. Pre-ordering gives you a Steam key on launch day, at a discount, and also a non-DRM version of the game for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Plus you are helping the creative team get through the last stretch of development. Thanks!

Reviews

Fast company - "Bientôt l’Été resonates like an accomplished painting or a good piece of music."

The Verge - "Finally, a video game as artistic and hard to understand as French films."

Akimbo - "I was at times elated by the beauty of the sentiments expressed and, at other times, surprised by how dark it could feel."

About This Game

Bientôt l’été is a videogame for two players. Two players who pretend to be lovers. They pretend to be lovers separated from each other by lightyears of deep space. They have lonely walks along the shore of a simulated ocean, thinking wistful thoughts of each other. Thoughts from ancient Earth literature by Marguerite Duras.

The empty beach, the strong wind, the gentle music and a small colony of electric seagulls are their only companions. Yet their heart is full and their mind confused. Walk along the shore, until they meet the emptiness.

When it all becomes too much, they run towards each other. Enabled by intergalactic networks, they touch each other’s holographic bodies in cyberspace. A surreal game of chess becomes the apparatus through which they, man and woman, can talk. The words they have were given to them, as they have always been to lovers everywhere.

The sea remains, tugging at their hearts when not at their hairs and clothes, as it itself is tugged by the virtual moon. And as great as the desire for the other may be, they cannot stay away from the wind and the waves and the sand. Every time they find a new treasure. An abandoned tennis field. An heap of coal. A dead dog. Ordinary. Absurd. Meaningless. Yet comforting.

Enter a café, exit a villa, enter a casino, exit the ruin of an ancient colonial mansion. We know this is not real. So it doesn’t surprise us. Nothing surprises us. It doesn’t matter when you feel the pain of love. Of being in love, of falling in love, of leaving in love. There is no such thing as time. There is only love. And it never stops. No matter how much it hurts.

I received this game quite a long time ago, but never got around to trying it until this week. Apparently it was promoted as on sale as recently as last month, but the experience of myself and other recent users is puzzling, as if the game is no longer supported nor properly functioning.

For instance, a primary feature of this game, "encounter" at a cafe table seems available neither in simulation mode nor with live players showing up. This has been reported by myself and other current players in the discussions section for this game, and if it is a temporary situation or other issue there has been no notice taken of it yet by the developer/publisher.

I have never before used the "report this game" feature of Steam, but having selected it I see that it only applies to content, so I don't know how to discourage people from buying this game except to tell you that for myself and others the game is essentially not functional at this time and perhaps should not be available for sale.

Before noting that I said I do not recommend this, please understand that it's not bad.With this confusing statement out of the way, let's get started. Bientôt l'été isn't a game. It's an artistic piece, and this needs to be understood. From what I could gather, the goal of it was to demonstrate how people can communicate, even if limited by language, actions, or possible phrases (as seen by the chess board in-game). However, this requires that someone somewhere is playing at the same time you are, unless you want to talk to an AI. It's a beautiful experience when it works well, but this is so rare I can't recommend a purchase at any time other than during a sale. Due to the game's artistic goal and nature, it was heavily slammed upon release, driving away potential players. Without a community waiting for another person to chat with, more people slammed the game for not having a community. This is Bientôt l'été's biggest problem, without players it simply cannot achieve the desired effect.For this reason I suggest buying this when it's on sale. More players are likely to be experimenting with it at the same time as you, and you're more likely to see the beauty of limited conversation with a complete stranger.

This is, by far, the best cigarette smoking simulator on the market. At first, it seemed confusing with the long walks on the beach and random phrases popping up on screen, but only once I entered the café did I realize the actual draw of this title. As I sat at the chess board and waited five minutes for a partner to join, I then realized something else; I was the only person to buy this game. Thank god they included a computer controlled character to interact with or I may have missed the hidden gem in this pile of coal. We moved our chess pieces across the board and spoke sweet nothings to each other until only silence hung in the air. And then I saw it. Near the bottom of the screen was a classic lighter and a half full soft pack of smokes. Move over wine glass! The true beauty and meaning of game play was at hand. Once clicked, the screen goes black and you can actually hear your character click the flint, light up, and take a long, smooth drag. You can almost taste the tobacco. A puff of smoke fills the screen upon return to the scene. The cigarette is then seen majestically smoldering in the ashtray on the table. If clicked again, another drag is taken until there is nothing but a snuffed out filter left. Oh, but that's just the beginning. It seems there is no limit to the amount of cigarettes you can smoke! My only complaint would be that there aren't enough ways to put out your coffin nail. The choice to put it out on your lover's hand or leave it floating in their wine glass should be included in a future patch for the sole reason that some of the predestined lines are mad creepy. 8 out of 10 because I can't tell if they're menthol or not.

Before you, I never knew anguish. I tried to Imagine myself without you.

This game is about walking on the beach. And drinking wine. And smoking cigarrettes. And conversations that are incredibly fatalistic.

I liked the feeling I had after I played this game, but I cannot recommend it. I feel like it's more like a prototype for a mini-game. Kind of like a dream sequence or something, that keeps you from getting bored with the actual game, except there is no actual game. Just uselessness coupled with self-hate. C'est la vie.

This hits a very niche market... and not very well. I typically really enjoy introspective forlorn romps through artsy settings, but this is a bit of a streatch even for me.

Spoilers follow:

No seriously, there's nothing to this game, so litterally anything I say past this point will "ruin" it for you.

Don't read further unless you've either already played it our have no intention to.

So the idea is that you go for long walks on the beach reflecting on this relationship you've had. Sometimes there's something on the beach that will drop a chess peice which you can take to the house and use on a chess board to hold something resembling a conversation with an online partner... The dialouge seems to suggest that these two love each other out of necessity and not for any actual romantic reasons... they don't seem to actually like each other but are bound to eachother anyway. It's really sad...These two need to see other people, but it's clear that there are no other fish in the sea, so to speak.Oh, and once you've collected all the chess peices, the next item to drop is a gun... well that escalated quickly. You can use the gun on the chess board like a peice. It does nothing in particular, but I think it's more meant to be a metaphore for putting an end to the relationship more than anything.

To sum up the game: Help I'm trapped in a holodeck of angst and regret! I don't know what love is and I want to kill myself because I'm so messed up about it!

Game developers should be encouraged to challenge the status quo with narrative and mechanics, but I feel that there are certain best practices for game design that Tale of Tales often overlooks for no visible reason or benefit to the game. While Bientôt l'été has the most conventional controls and straightforward instructions of their games to date, it still suffers from the same problem: some strange design decisions have little to nothing to do with, and may even hinder the concept.

Imagine the PS3 game Journey: two players meet at random in a surreal world to make a connection. Except in Bientôt l'été, both players are chat robots stating phrases at random while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, and playing chess (with a catch: you have to find the pieces first, but one at a time). The highlight of the game should be the multiplayer, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be very populated (a symptom of its avant garde concept, I guess), and the interactions are severely limited.

What should be a virtual date with a stranger in a surreal world becomes tedius, with no real interaction or connection with said stranger. Unlike Journey, which limits your characters' intractability to serve the purpose of the mechanics and design, Bientôt l'été's design stands at odds with its concept, preventing players from creating any kind of meaningful connections.

For the record, I have played this game, but for some reason Steam isn't showing my actual time put into it.

"A work of art"

Yes, I have to admit that Bientôt l'été was indeed a work of art. But that's the exact reason this game is practically unplayable. I gave it a little while, hoping to get somewhere, but instead I just sat there and played chess while rereading the same dialogue over and over. I don't know whether this game gets more interesting or enjoyable later on, but from what I have played, I can tell you that I'm glad I bought this during last year's Summer Sale, because for $9.99, Bientôt l'été shouldn't be payed for until it goes on sale... between 80-100% off.

- Lack of any significant, forward-driven narration/story/plot- Lack of any significant, long-term gameplay- Odd/Awkward, not exactly comforting (keyboard) controls- Multiplayer barely works for the lack of people playing this game (workaround: joining Steam group and timing online time with other people)

Long:Interesting from an art-ish and ambiance-related point of view, lacking gameplay-wise, and with an irritating control scheme.

Badmouths may call it a boring walking simulator. It provides less exploration and narration than for example Dear Esther, but a bit more than for example Proteus, and has it's own unique graphical style and ambiance. The graphics, sounds and music give you an eerie feeling, it's dream-like, surreal and transcendental, and for this alone it's interesting to look at and listen to, eventually even admirable.

You select a male or female character stored inside tubes. "It's nearly summer" you are told. You appear with your character on a simulated/virtual beach shore and walk it. Random phrases will appear drawn onto the ground. You "collect" ("remember) some of them by closing your eyes, you also hear them voiced in French then (they are always subtitled in the language of your choice). You collect some object "hidden" beneath some worldly, "holographic" thing (a tree, a bush, a crane, ...) that disappears to reveal this object (chess pieces mostly, and one more unique and confusing one which leaves room for interpretation). You enter a house, meet with a virtual partner of the opposite gender in some sort of bar, put your objects in turns on a chessboard (freely, you don't actually play chess - some spots trigger the words/phrases you previously collected to appear on the screen and be voiced), take a smoke, drink some whine or select some pre-set of music tracks to play music-box like in the background. The lines you collect and make appear are circling around the two characters and their relationship, who are or used to be lovers After that you leave the house, walk along the shore again, collect more phrases and another object and enter the house again. This you repeat as many times as you wish, at some point the simulation starts over again with you collecting about the same pieces again (the game however seems to remember all pieces you once collected - I've just started up the game again and could place all the objects I once picked up many months back when I first played this game).

The partner in the house is either A.I.-controlled or an actual human who is playing the game at the same time as you do. You don't see his/her name, he/she is a stranger, there is no text or voice chat to use, you only communicate with the words and through symbolism you can do with the chessboard and the objects, and the only indication whether there is someone else playing/waiting in the house is - from what I've been told and noticed - a window you see from the outside that has lights on. I haven't been able to meet up with a real human yet, because either the mechanics to match you up with one are not working too well or this game was never played by too many people to begin with. There is a Steam group one can join, and sometimes people try to group up through it. However this is a bit of a misleading way of playing this game, since it was obviously intended to meet strangers, an idea Tale of Tales originally came up with in "The Endless Forest", but which isn't executed too well in this game. A game that did this better was the PSN game "Journey". But I guess one must probably consider that "Journey" was a larger success than any of Tale of Tales' games ever were - the more players play these games the higher/better the chances to meet up with them. At some point no one will play these anymore, I guess, not even "Journey".

The control scheme isn't entirely bad but not exactly too enjoyable. This is a problem I keep seeing in the games made by Tale of Tales. You look around by moving the mouse to either side of the screen, you walk by holding down the left mouse button, you close your eyes with the right mouse button and run with spacebar. It feels odd/awkward and not very comforting. They could adapt to the more classic control schemes that games with a first- and third-person view give you, the usual WASD and mouse-look thing. I don't see any good reason in doing things differently there. Has it to do with being different for the sake of being different? Or are they inept and don't play their own games? I don't know, and I don't like being harsher to them than they deserve. You can play with a gamepad too, maybe I should try that and will feel better then.

I really enjoyed Dear Esther. I also enjoy Tale of Tales other games, like The Path. I simply do not understand nor enjoy this game at all. I went into it with low expectations and an open mind, I left questioning exactly what should be considered "art" in gaming.

Bientôt l'été is the most pretentious of pretentious indie art games. One that is "too deep for you" to even understand whatever trivial message it's trying to put across. Let me just say right now that when a developer needs to address their entire userbase in a forum post, revealing what their inspiration for the game was in order for you to understand its purpose, then the developer has completely failed to convey any sort of rational thought with their game. Still, no one slightly understands the purpose of Bientôt l'été and those who do are obviously elitist intellectuals whose thoughts and opinions on the matter are also "too deep for you" to understand yet again. It's hard not to call Poe's Law into play.

This game has a mechanical crutch which becomes limited by its users. The main attraction of Bientôt l'été is being able to connect with other players in a cafe of sorts, decked out with a chess board, a glass of wine, cigarettes, and the ability to communicate intricately with one another. Except this all falls apart when you realise you're the sole person in existence to be playing this game at this point in time, forcing you to instead substitute a human presence with artificial intelligence. This severely impacts the game as a whole.

I never found a partner to play with so I had to resort to A.I., and after collecting all of the chess pieces I managed to find a gun... although my character holds it backwards. Does this gun do anything more than intimidate the opposing player? If not, then there is no point to this game since there aren't enough people playing this game at any one time; you can't really surprise artificial intelligence.

The entire process of Bientôt l'été took me little over 80 minutes to achieve. After collecting the gun and positioning all the chess pieces in their correct order, hoping for something to "unlock" or tell me I've done something right, only to find out nothing much happens. I decided to go back out and collect more items, coming to a stinging realisation that the cycle has restarted and I'm collecting the very first chess pieces again.

Bientot L'Ete can be considered art. But, it's not. Its interface is clumsy, the graphics are passable, the sounds ok, the gameplay non-existant, the controls poor and the story alright. It's an interesting idea that is poorly executed. I had no pleasure playing (experiencing ?) it.If you really want to play a Tale Of Tales game play The Path instead. That one's certainly more enjoyable than this piece of crap. Otherwise just stay away from it and go play something decent.

I never understod this game. I watched and read reviews about this game so maybe I could be able to do so. I played it, and I was really excited about giving it a try, but after some time.. I became hopeless. So here is what I think the porpuse of the game was: *Since it is a walk simulator (and I'm not very familiar with them) I found some kind of peace but the lack of communication/interaction made me feel awkward and very dissapointed since the multiplayer option never worked for me. - you might find peace but in a weird way. *The story... doesn't even have one. - maybe that's what the game wants you to do, to build/imagine your own. (then you better read a book or play Minecraft, or something like that).*Music is okay and it indeed relaxes you but there's always something else that relaxes you.*The controls.. arghh... just terrible.

<<Games like Lifeless Planet and Proteus have much more to offer, they lead you where they want to, and they indeed give you different feelings such as fear or excitement, Bientôt l'été gives you freedom, gives you a choice.. but after that, nothing gets to happen>>

Once again, Tale of Tales gets a recommendation from me for you to NOT buy this game. Stick to Journey if you want to experience anything that this game does that even approaches interesting, as Journey did that particular aspect more meaningfully, and in a more engaging way. Yet again, they have a clunky, awkward, even painful interface. Yet again, they seem to make the act of discovery as boring and disappointing as possible. Yet again, they seem to approach emotion like some inhuman creature who thinks of our species as idiots. Tale of Tales just tries too hard to be some caricature of artistic in a desperate plea for respect. A plea that has been going on for over a decade without results.